Broncos begin $175 million headquarter build with groundbreaking ceremony

Shovels in a box of dirt might be ceremonial, but make no mistake, the Broncos’ headquarters and training facility construction project is off and running.

Adjacent to Thursday’s celebration and photo op, fencing has appeared in recent days, construction equipment is moving in and the $175 million project is quickly ramping up.

All of this marks the next phase in the project, which will culminate in a 215,000-square-foot building that CEO and owner Greg Penner said Thursday will be a world-class facility focused on football.

“This is going to be a great facility,” Penner told reporters. “It’s going to be modern. But we didn’t want it to be too big. We wanted for players to be in an area where they feel like these are their spaces. …

“For the players, it’s going to be terrific. For the folks that work for us, we’re bringing a lot of people down from the stadium that are working there and getting everybody together in one building, we think, will create a collaborative environment that helps us reach our goals.”

The planning to make that reality is down to the foot — or steps.

Broncos president Damani Leech said the process has included determining the exact distances from the new locker room outward to the weight room, rehab areas, practice fields, cafeteria and more. Currently, players shuffle between three buildings at Broncos Park powered by CommonSpirit.

“This building has treated us well since 1990, but you all see it here on a daily basis: Players walking across the parking lot to the weight room,” Leech said. “Late in the season that’s a cold and icy walk. They’re walking across the field to get into the indoor practice facility. So just managing the number of steps per day. We tracked that. How many steps from the locker room as the center point does it take to get to key spaces in the building? How does that compare to how we have the facility designed? How does that compare to facilities around the NFL?”

The building timeline doesn’t feature much wiggle room. Leech said the goal is to move the team from the 34-year-old existing facility into the new building in June 2026, in time for training camp that year to begin.

“It’s pretty tight,” Leech said. “Probably what I am most nervous about is everybody getting our stuff packed up out of the current building and actually walking it across the field to the new building.

“This is where having (Broncos senior vice president of construction) Amy Dee on our staff and in the building — she’s got more than a decade of doing global construction for Netflix. She’s built offices around the world.”

Penner said the idea for building a new training complex first came to be during a conversation with senior vice president of operations Chip Conway, who was outlining the costs and work necessary to keep the existing building up to NFL standards.

Another option would have been to do what some teams have done and turn their headquarters into part of a broader entertainment district, build it at the site of their stadium or both.

Penner, though, said Denver decided against that for multiple reasons.

“The timing, which as we’ve talked about, we’re evaluating options for a new stadium potentially, whether that’s on the current site or somewhere else,” Penner said. “But we weren’t ready to make that decision at this point. The second thing is some teams do have the (combined setup) with, I think, mixed results.

“There are some things that are positives to having both in one location. But there’s also something about coming to a place where this is where we practice. This is our space. Sometimes we’ll have fans and partners here but it’s really about work and practice. Sometimes if you combine it with more entertainment, there can be some negatives with that.”